Building solar, wind or nuclear plants creates an insignificant carbon footprint compared with savings from avoiding fossil fuels, a new study suggests.

The research, published in Nature Energy, measures the full lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of a range of sources of electricity out to 2050.

It shows that the carbon footprint of solar, wind and nuclear power are many times lower than coal or gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS). This remains true after accounting for emissions during manufacture, construction and fuel supply.

“There was a concern that it is a lot harder than suggested by energy scenario models to achieve climate targets, because of the energy required to produce wind turbines and solar panels and associated emissions,” explains project leader Dr Gunnar Luderer, who is an energy system analyst at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research (PIK).

Luderer tells Carbon Brief: “The most important finding [of our research] was that the expansion of wind and solar power…comes with life-cycle emissions that are much smaller than the remaining emissions from existing fossil power plants, before they can finally be decommissioned.”

Carbon debt

Critics sometimes argue that nuclear, wind or solar power have a hidden carbon footprint, due to their manufacture and construction. This large “carbon debt”, and the related debt of energy, must be paid off if they are to cut emissions over their lifetime.

Factories churning out solar panels use large amounts of electricity, often sourced from coal-fired power stations in China. Wind turbines and nuclear plants need a lot of steel and concrete. And the centrifuges that separate nuclear fuel also rack up a big electricity bill.

Yet zero-carbon sources of electricity are not the only ones to have a hidden, indirect carbon and energy footprint.

For coal and gas, these lifecycle energy uses and emissions come from extraction machinery and fuel transport. Significantly, they also come from methane leaks at pipelines, well heads or coal mines. These lifecycle emissions continue, even if coal or gas plants add CCS, which also may not capture 100% of emissions at the power plant.

What’s more, the indirect energy uses and emissions of each technology will shift over time, due to changing fuel sources, advances in manufacturing and the evolution of global electricity supplies.

The new research, from lead author Michaja Pehl and colleagues, comprehensively measures the lifecycle energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of different sources of electricity, between now and 2050.

It then compares these hidden footprints in a world that cuts emissions in line with a 2C climate goal and a world that stops further climate action.

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Australia has been named as one of eight countries expected to lead a massive boom in energy storage uptake that will see the global market double six times over between 2016 and 2030, to an installed total of 125GW/305 gigawatt-hours in 2030.

In its Energy Storage Forecast, 2017-30, released on Tuesday, Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts the global energy storage market will follow a “remarkable” growth trajectory similar to that charted by the solar industry between 2000 to 2015.

The report predicts that the global energy storage market will grow to a cumulative 125GW/305GWh by 2030, attracting $US103 billion in investment over this period, as behind the meter storage becomes “ubiquitous” in countries like Australia, and combines with utility-scale storage to play a crucial role in the transition to renewables.

And as we have seen with solar, energy storage market momentum will be driven by falling costs – in the case of lithium-ion battery systems, for example, BNEF is forecasting annual cost reductions of around 10 per cent from now to 2020, and 7 per cent a year by 2030. (Although this will mostly be driven by demand from a booming electric vehicle market, the report says.)

“The industry has just begun,” said BNEF energy storage analyst Yayoi Sekine, lead author of the report, in comments on Tuesday. “With so much investment going into battery technology, falling costs and with significant addition of wind and solar capacity in all markets, energy storage will play a crucial part in the energy transformation.”

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VSUN Energy, the vanadium redox flow battery storage offshoot of mining group Australian Vanadium, has firmed up plans to target Australia’s nascent home energy storage market – most likely with a base model of 15kWh – and to set up a local manufacturing base as it works to drive down battery costs and catch the wave of home solar and storage.

Australian Vanadium managing director Vincent Algar said on Friday that the company was “very well advanced” in negotiations with a number of international manufacturers of vanadium redox flow batteries, including the German based outfit, Schmid, which already makes a residential VRB system for the European market.

Algar said that the company was also working on meeting certain technical “tick the box” inverter compatibility requirements, necessary to the introduction of domestic-scale VRB into the the Australian market.

Australian Vandium this week revealed that it had terminated its exclusive dealership agreement with German vanadium flow battery maker, Gildemeister, on the basis it was too restrictive to VSUN Energy’s growth plans.

It will, however, continue to market the company’s CellCube battery stacks, on a non-exclusive basis, while it continues negotiations with a number of VRB makers.

In an interview with RenewEconomy on Friday, Algar said he was excited about the technology’s prospects in the Australian residential energy storage market, despite differences in cost, and a yet-to-take-off market already crowded with competitive li-ion options.

Currently, a 15kWh VRB system sits somewhere at the $25,000 mark, he said, but – as has happened with lithium-ion – he says projections are that VRB will start to come down the cost curve as the money and focus of the clean tech market turns more and more towards innovative stationery storage solutions.

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The potentially industry crippling home battery installation safety guideline proposed by Standards Australia has again been slammed by the industry, as fundamentally flawed and – if passed – certain to throw the energy storage industry into chaos, both in Australia and overseas.

In a newsletter to members on Tuesday, Australia’s Energy Storage Council said that the current Draft Battery Standard ASNZ5139 – which effectively bans the installation of lithium-ion battery storage systems inside homes and garages on the basis that they are a fire risk – needed to be completely re-written.

“The draft Standard is not evidence-based and has enormous implications for the Australian and global battery storage industry,” the ESC said.

“The Energy Storage Council will oppose the adoption of the Draft Standard. The Energy Storage Council will vote against the Draft Standard and will urge other committee members to do the same.”

The call to arms comes at the close of a nine-week consultation period, during which time the draft standard was open for public submissions by Standards Australia, attracting more than 2,900 public submissions.

The submissions will now be “considered in detail”, and “resolved” by the technical committee, with any “substantive changes” released for further consultation. Once all comments are resolved, the SA technical committee will hold a vote to decide whether the document is published, or not.

As we first reported here, the draft standard, which requires battery systems to be located outside of homes and garages, in purpose-built “kiosks” or “bunkers,” was first aired in February this year, but was thought to have been hosed down after a major industry-side backlash.

It resurfaced in June, however, as part of the draft voluntary standard for On-Site Battery Systems, when it was released by Standards Australia for nine weeks of public consultation.

In a June 13 media release, SA said that the draft standard – which it noted had “not been without controversy” – currently included provisions to minimise the risk of self-sustaining fires.

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A world first hybrid renewables trial, pairing a grid-connected wind farm with lithium-ion battery storage and energy management software, has been switched on in Spain, in a bid to boost the integration of variable-generation renewables into electricity networks around the world.

The project, led by Spanish wind energy giant Acciona, will use in-house developed “simulation” software to control the battery storage systems at a specially developed hybrid power plant, which is located next to Acciona’s experimental wind farm at Barasoain (Navarra).

The storage system has two batteries in separate containers: one a fast-response 1MW/0.39MWh battery that can maintain 1MW of power for 20 minutes; the other a slower-response battery with greater autonomy that can maintain 0.7 MW for 1 hour.

Both of the Samsung SDI-supplied batteries will be connected to a 3MW Acciona wind turbine – one of five that make up the Barasoain Experimental Wind Farm – and will store energy produced by the turbine when required.

The installation also has three other units: one for medium voltage cells and analyzers, another for inverters/chargers and a transformer (installed by Ingeteam, a company participating in the project), and a third for the control and monitoring equipment.

Acciona says that he main aim of the trial is to use the software and grid-connected storage solutions to optimise the quality of the wind energy that is sent to the grid.

It will also test the plants ability to provide ancillary services to the electric power system – necessary to maintain a continuous balance between supply and demand – and to shift supply to match periods of higher demand, thus improving the economic performance of the wind farm.

The project has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which manages the Spanish Centre for Industrial Development (CDTI).

And the Acciona-developed software – or ‘ADOSA’ (Analysis, Dimensioning and Optimisation of Storage Systems) – recently won the top prize from the Spanish Wind Energy Association, in the field of R&D.

“The application of electric power storage systems using batteries connected to wind farms and solar plants is a field with great growth potential due to the major development of renewable energies worldwide, lower battery technology prices and improved efficiency,” Acciona said in a media statement on Tuesday.

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In a series of tweets in early March, Tesla founder, CEO and Chairman Elon Musk made a dramatic offer to help address the issues bedeviling South Australia’s electricity grid: he offered to install 100MW of battery storage within 100 days — or the system would be free. This led to talks between Musk and South Australia’s Premier, and with Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

At the time of writing, it was unclear whether the offer would be taken up, and there are serious questions as to whether such a system would be an appropriate solution to the blackouts plaguing the Australian state. But the attention that Musk’s offer generated is testament to the increasingly important role that battery storage, at scale, is playing in modern electricity systems.

Storage technology is the vital missing element in the struggle to enable the transition to clean energy, allowing grids to accommodate ever-growing volumes of intermittent generation and transforming the economics of renewable energy systems. But, along the way, the growth of battery storage promises to transform power markets, accelerate disruption of the utility business model and challenge regulators to rethink how they oversee generation, transmission and distribution.

The growing penetration of batteries is, essentially, a solution to a problem that dates back to the construction of the first electricity grids. “The electricity supply chain is the longest supply chain in the world with almost no ability to store the product,” says Matt Roberts, Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Energy Storage Association (ESA). “That means we have scaled everything to meet the absolute peak of demand — it’s an incredibly costly and inefficient way to build a network.”

The inability to store surplus power (beyond the limited capacity of older storage technologies such as pumped hydro systems) is becoming a more pressing problem with the greater penetration of wind and solar technologies. Solar output, while relatively predictable, dips in cloudy conditions, while local wind speeds are hard to predict with confidence more than a few days into the future.

In addition, thermal power plants currently play an important role in balancing generation and load to maintain the frequency of power grids within a constant range, which protects electric equipment. Renewable energy generation is unable to provide the on-demand balancing power needed for grid stability.

This means that battery systems — predominantly, to date, using the lithium-ion technology seen in electric vehicles — have multiple uses, and multiple market needs they can address.

“The opportunity for battery storage exists in all areas of the utilities value chain — in generation, transmission and distribution, as well as on the consumer side, behind the meter,” says Manish Kumar, Managing Director of Arlington, Virginia-based AES Energy Storage, an arm of power company AES Corporation.

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Have you heard the line recently that grid-based battery storage is “coming”, but is not quite “commercial”, but might be in a few years time, or even a decade or two?

It’s a common misconception. But if you wondered about the overwhelming response to the recent tenders by South Australia and Victoria for the country’s largest battery storage installations, here’s why: The technology is already in the money.

That, at least, is the estimate of Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Kobad Bhavnagri, who says that battery storage is not just in the money, it is a long way into the money in states like South Australia, already with a high level of wind and solar and volatile wholesale electricity prices.

“We’ve seen the price of battery packs as fallen by 75 per cent by 2010, and our calculations show that will fall by a further 75 per cent by 2030,” due to technology innovation and manufacturing scale, Bhavnagri said.

That means that large-scale battery storage is already viable in large parts of Australia. In South Australia, it is offering internal rates of return of around 30 per cent (even without new market rules that will further encourage them), and in Queensland they are also profitable due to that state’s price volatility. NSW and Victoria will follow soon enough.

“That is a  great story for integrating renewables,” Bhavnagri said. (And we should also point that this value stack for storage does not include network benefits, where battery storage is already seen to reduce cost of upgrades of poles and wires by around 30 per cent).

So, what does this mean for the grid? The CSIRO and the Energy Networks Australia gave some insight into this in their report last week, in which they outlined their pathway to a zero emissions grid based around solar, wind and storage, and why it would be much cheaper, cleaner, smarter and more reliable than the current iteration.

AGL Energy gave its own version of the future this week in a presentation to a Macquarie Group conference. As we reported earlier, the company once known as Australian Gas Light no longer sees gas as a transition fuel.

AGL says the economics of gas-fired generation don’t stack up, because wind and solar and storage are cheaper, and major gas producer Santos this week gave us an insight into why gas has little credibility on the environment front.

In his presentation, AGL chief financial officer Brett Redman provided this graph illustrating what has been presume to happen on the left – renewables with gas filling in the gaps – and what will happen with storage.

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San Jose, California, April 17th, 2017: TrinaBESS announced today that the company will introduce its large-scale Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) called TrinaMega for the US Market at the 27th Annual Energy Storage Association (ESA) Expo, held in Denver on April 18^th – 20^th.

TrinaMega is a modular plug-and-play containerized BESS solution, entirely custom-made, in order to answer specific battery usage and functions from utilities and large energy users. TrinaMega provides one of the best battery densities on the market for utility-scale projects, up to 2.9 MWh per containerized BESS. Each TrinaMega is scalable, and includes the complete BESS system, UPS, SCADA unit, thermal management, fire suppressant, power supply and auxiliary systems. TrinaMega is designed, manufactured and tested in full compliance with the latest edition of IEC, EN and UL standards, and provides one of the most optimized safety, control and monitoring systems.

“With more than 100 engineers, TrinaBESS designs each TrinaMega to fit specific battery needs for each projects in the United States, from resource adequacy, spinning reserves, frequency regulation, sub-second demand response, non-export, to power back up.” said Anne Torricelli, Director, Energy Storage Solutions, North America. “With the expansion of TrinaBESS in North America, we adapted the design of a modular solution that can meet the increasing demand for energy storage in the USA while providing local support directly from California.”

“Because of the high efficiency and excellent reliability of our TrinaBESS products, TrinaMega has been successfully developed in the UK and Africa markets. Some of the latest TrinaMega installations include a Triad and Frequency Regulation project in the UK and micro-grid energy storage projects in Africa and island countries in Indian ocean and pacific.” said Frank Qi, General Manager of TrinaBESS. “USA is the largest Energy Storage market in the world, and one of most important markets for TrinaBESS. With project references in Europe, Africa, Australia and Japan, TrinaBESS also continues its international expansion with local offices in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Sydney and Singapore.”

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